Thy power had been so great,
That thou couldst change my fate,
By changes in another wrought,
Till now, alas! I know it.
Among those who most interested themselves in the progress of poetry in Spain, and labored most directly to introduce it at the court of Castile, the person first in rank after the king was his near kinsman, Henry, Marquis of Villena, born in 1384, and descended in the paternal line from the royal house of Aragon, and in the maternal from that of Castile.[588] “In early youth,” says one who knew him well, “he was inclined to the sciences and the arts, rather than to knightly exercises, or even to affairs, whether of the state or the Church; for, without any master, and none constraining him to learn, but rather hindered by his grandfather, who would have had him for a knight, he did, in childhood, when others are wont to be carried to their schools by force, turn himself to learning against the good-will of all; and so high and so subtile a wit had he, that he learned any science or art to which he addicted himself, in such wise, that it seemed as if it were done by force of nature.”[589]
But his rank and position brought him into the affairs of the world and the troubles of the times, however little he might be fitted to play a part in them. He was made Master of the great military and monastic Order of Calatrava, but, owing to irregularities in his election, was ultimately ejected from his place, and left in a worse condition than if he had never received it.[590] In the mean time, he resided chiefly at the court of Castile; but from 1412 to 1414 he was at that of his kinsman, Ferdinand the Just, of Aragon, in honor of whose coronation at Saragossa he composed an allegorical drama, which is unhappily lost. Afterwards, he accompanied that monarch to Barcelona, where, as we have seen, he did much to restore and sustain the poetical school called the Consistory of the Gaya Sciencia. When, however, he lost his place as Master of the Order of Calatrava, he sunk into obscurity. The Regency of Castile, willing to make him some amends for his losses, gave him the poor lordship of Iniesta in the bishopric of Cuenca; and there he spent the last twenty years of his life in comparative poverty, earnestly devoted to such studies as were known and fashionable in his time. He died while on a visit at Madrid, in 1434; the last of his great family.[591]
Among his favorite studies, besides poetry, history, and elegant literature, were philosophy and the mathematics, astrology, and alchemy. But in an age of great ignorance and superstition, such pursuits were not indulged in without rebuke. Don Enrique, therefore, like others, was accounted a necromancer; and so deeply did this belief strike its roots, that a popular tradition of his guilt has survived in Spain nearly or quite down to our own age.[592] The effects, at the time, were yet more unhappy and absurd. A large and rare collection of books that he left behind him excited alarm, immediately after his death. “Two cart-loads of them,” says one claimed to have been his contemporary and friend, “were carried to the king, and because it was said they related to magic and unlawful arts, the king sent them to Friar Lope de Barrientos;[593] and Friar Lope, who cares more to be about the Prince than to examine matters of necromancy, burnt above a hundred volumes, of which he saw no more than the king of Morocco did, and knew no more than the Dean of Ciudad Rodrigo; for many men now-a-days make themselves the name of learned by calling others ignorant; but it is worse yet when men make themselves holy by calling others necromancers.”[594] Juan de Mena, to whom the letter containing this statement was addressed, offered a not ungraceful tribute to the memory of Villena in three of his three hundred coplas;[595] and the Marquis of Santillana, distinguished for his love of letters, wrote a separate poem on the occasion of his noble friend’s death, placing him, after the fashion of his age and country, above all Greek, above all Roman fame.[596]
But though the unhappy Marquis of Villena may have been in advance of his age, as far as his studies and knowledge were concerned, still the few of his works now known to us are far from justifying the whole of the reputation his contemporaries gave him. His “Arte Cisoria,” or Art of Carving, is proof of this. It was written in 1423, at the request of his friend, the chief carver of John the Second, and begins, in the most formal and pedantic manner, with the creation of the world and the invention of all the arts, among which the art of carving is made early to assume a high place. Then follows an account of what is necessary to make a good carver; after which we have, in detail, the whole mystery of the art, as it ought to be practised at the royal table. It is obvious from sundry passages of the work, that the Marquis himself was by no means without a love for the good cheer he so carefully explains,—a circumstance, perhaps, to which he owed the gout that we are told severely tormented his latter years. But in its style and composition this specimen of the didactic prose of the age has little value, and can be really curious only to those who are interested in the history of manners.[597]
Similar remarks might probably be made about his treatise on the “Arte de Trobar,” or the “Gaya Sciencia”; a sort of Art of Poetry, addressed to the Marquis of Santillana, in order to carry into his native Castile some of the poetical skill possessed by the Troubadours of the South. But we have only an imperfect abstract of it, accompanied, indeed, with portions of the original work, which are interesting as being the oldest on its subject in the language.[598] More interesting, however, than either would be his translations of the Rhetorica of Cicero, the Divina Commedia of Dante, and the Æneid of Virgil. But of the first we have lost all trace. Of the second we know only that it was in prose, and addressed to his friend and kinsman the Marquis of Santillana. And of the Æneid there remain but seven books, with a commentary to three of them, from which a few extracts have been published.[599]
Villena’s reputation, therefore, must rest chiefly on his “Trabajos de Hercules,” or The Labors of Hercules, written to please one of his Catalonian friends, Pero Pardo, who asked to have an explanation of the virtues and achievements of Hercules; always a great national hero in Spain. The work seems to have been much admired and read in manuscript, and, after printing was introduced into Spain, it went through two editions before the year 1500; but all knowledge of it was so completely lost soon afterwards, that the most intelligent authors of Spanish literary history down to our own times have generally spoken of it as a poem. It is, however, in fact, a short prose treatise, filling, in the first edition—that of 1483—thirty large leaves. It is divided into twelve chapters, each devoted to one of the twelve great labors of Hercules, and each subdivided into four parts: the first part containing the common mythological story of the labor under consideration; the second, an explanation of this story as if it were an allegory; the third, the historical facts upon which it is conjectured to have been founded; and the fourth, a moral application of the whole to some one of twelve conditions, into which the author very arbitrarily divides the human race, beginning with princes and ending with women.